installing to a flash drive

[Mortrix927]

Most flash drives are too slow to even work with an OS....think mostly they are 15 MB/s read or something. But, they are good for Linux OS...I've ran Ubuntu and Damn Small Linux off of them...Windows would be more of a problem IMO

 

Any USB stick will be damaged over time from multiple read, write, and deletion. It all depends on what company you bought it from. Our friend gave us a generic 512 MB stick that we used to get drivers for when we had to re-format my family's computers. The thing died in a few months...CRC error. I'm guessing the higher grade ones last longer.

 

It's one of the reason's I haven't gotten a SSD yet (other than being a wee bit too expensive still). A lot of them say they can withstand millions of writes, fragmentation, etc...but I'm still skeptical. In another year or so, they will be cheaper, then maybe I will get one.

In theory, an SSD (a flash drive is a slow SSD), should last a lot longer than a standard hard drive of the same capacity. (On the order of a thousand fold) The reason being there is no moving parts to wear out, no head to damage, etc. If they say they can only withstand millions of writes...time to put it in the trash, it will last about a half hour under normal use. Except in very limited cases, fragmentation is not an issue with SSD's; as it can access any address at exactly the same speed, as opposed to a standard hard disk that actually has tto move the cylander and find what your looking for. The flash/SSD's are a bit more sensitive to power fluctuations, and you should avoid "just yanking it", as sudden power loss "can" result in loss of data or loss of drive.